Interactive Fiction

I recently found out that I will be able to teach the advanced writing seminar (in German) in the fall again. A course that is supposed to be filled with constant writing exercises and grammar reviews does not sound to be the most exciting thing in the world. But I have been wanting to write interactive fiction with my language students for a while, and that time has finally come.

There are several platforms available for writing such fiction (think build your own adventure stories), such as Twine and Quest. These are , powerful and free tools, but I really like Inklewriter, free web-based software that gets you going in minutes. It features an excellent tutorial, automatic saving, options to import images (you could even make a graphic novel by importing your images from a software like Comic Life) made with and to export to kindle for a fee (otherwise it’s just browser-based).

It’s easily to work collaboratively on a project, and that’s what I plan to have my students do. I will give them a framework and a theme, but they will have lots of freedom to write the story/stories that they want. Before they write in the software, we will do some story-boarding and several peer and instructor revisions.